That's definitely a different problem... But why do you inflict yourself the pain of having another userspace program messing around with your video device in addition to Xorg (that already does a load of ****ty things)? I think they call it masochism

Long story! Using the Debian Sid kernels I cannot get framebuffers with the standard vesafb, only with uvesafb. So using 'vga=791' does nothing with a Debian post 2.6.24 kernel. But when I compile the kernel from kernel.org it *does* work.

But my problem of the "black terminal" does not occur when I use my older MX4000 AGP. Figure that.